Vito Schnabel Gallery will be hosting an exhibition “The Americans” by artist Walter Robinson at the gallery’s St. Moritz location in Switzerland.
The exhibition presents paintings by New York-based artist Walter Robinson (b.1950, Wilmington, Delaware), an important member of the Pictures Generation along with friends like Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, and Richard Prince. Often known as a "neo-Pop" painter, the artist has been a key figure of the New York art scene for decades as editor-in-chief of Artnet magazine, alongside being subject to exhibitions at several New York galleries. Raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Walter Robinson moved to New York in 1968 to attend Columbia University, where he studied Art History and Psychology. In 2014, a retrospective exhibition of 80 of his paintings was organized by Barry Blinderman for the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, IL which later traveled to the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, PA and Jeffrey Deitch in New York. His 1986 sheet painting “Baron Sinister” was recently acquired into the permanent collection of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition features paintings on sheets by Robinson that depict scenes from the covers of paperback romance novels—a central motif of his work. The artist began painting these pulp romance imagery in the late 1970s, describing its central theme as being at base level about appetites, from the sexual to the culinary. The show will include new “Romance” paintings, created this year, along with two works in the same series from 1986.